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5th Force of Nature: "The Portal Between the Visible and Hidden Universe"

Physicists
in Italy are about to start up a new experiment designed to hunt for
hypothetical particles such as the “dark photon” and carriers of a possible
fifth force of nature. "Dark Photons would provide a 'portal between the
visible and hidden sectors' and might also help solve other problems, such as
the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment," says Mauro Raggi of the University
of Rome “La Sapienza”.

The Positron
Annihilation into Dark Matter Experiment (PADME), located at the National
Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) laboratories in Frascati outside Rome, will
blast a thin diamond target with energetic positrons and record the mass of any
exotic new particles produced in the collisions continues a report in today's
Physics World.

The group at
Frascati will mainly target the dark photon, which is a heavy version of the
ordinary photon. Predicted by various extensions of the Standard Model, it
would interact with both dark matter and ordinary matter. Dark photons are not
themselves usually considered to be dark matter, since they would carry
relatively little mass and would tend to have decayed earlier in the history of
the universe.

Dark photons
are also being pursued at experiments in other laboratories, such as CERN in
Geneva and the Jefferson Lab in Virginia, US. But according to Raggi, PADME
will have the edge in being able to search for the “missing mass” of dark
photons – allowing the particles to be detected even when they leave no visible
decay products.

The
experiment will involve recording collisions that happen when positrons from
the Frascati lab’s linear accelerator collide with the electrons in a 100
μm-thick film of diamond. The resulting annihilations would normally yield two
ordinary photons but, if the dark photon exists, just a single visible photon
would be created. The mass of the missing particle could then be calculated by
subtracting the measured 4D space–time-momentum of the single visible photon in
each case from that of the incoming positron, plotting a spectrum of this
missing mass and then reading off the mass value of the spectral peak.

Image
credit: Astronomers have found clear indications that clumps of dark matter are
the nursing grounds for new born galaxies about twelve billion light years
away. A single nest of dark matter can nurture several young galaxies. A
scientifically accurate artistic image of galaxies twelve billion light years
away is at the top of the page. The blue nebulosity is dark matter. Denser
regions are white. The blue-white regions correspond to the dark matter clumps
or dark matter halos where young galaxies are forming. (Image created by Naomi
Ishikawa and Takaaki Takeda, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

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